"The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding, and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism, and self-interest, are the traits of success." In America, the inmates truly run the asylum.

The North American continent is being transformed from three sovereign nations: Canada, USA, Mexico, into one regional corporate power base, the North American Union. Unlike the creation of the European Union, there is no public political/ academic discourse on the merits, or pros and cons of a North American Union building up to a vote within each nation as to the wish of the people to join such a union. Instead the union is being created by stealth, is already well on its way to fruition, and is being imposed on us by our own elected representatives and government with no opposition.

Something remarkable happened on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Commentators began to declare, in somewhat exultant tones, that America had at last become a true empire. America was of course also a benevolent empire, they insisted, but that nod to altruistic tradition could not hide their excitement that America had at last joined the greatest empires of the past. History has not dealt kindly with imperial ambitions, and America, however benevolent her intent, cannot hope to be an exception.

U.S. military spending ($343 billion in the year 2000) is 69 percent greater than that of the next five highest nations combined. Russia, which has the second largest military budget, spends less than one-sixth what the United States does. Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and Syria spend $14.4 billion combined; Iran accounts for 52 percent of this total.

The USA is an isolationist country? Since when? The USA has a rich and varied history of Imperialistic intervention throughout the world for over 100 years. This article provides extensive details including numerous CIA operations.

As Americans honor those 2403 men, women, and children killed—and 1178 wounded—in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on December 7, 1941, recently released government documents concerning that “surprise” raid compel us to revisit some troubling questions.

The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, is a Washington-based think tank created in 1997. Above all else, PNAC desires and demands one thing: The establishment of a global American empire to bend the will of all nations. They chafe at the idea that the United States, the last remaining superpower, does not do more by way of economic and military force to bring the rest of the world under the umbrella of a new socio-economic Pax Americana.

America has, since its very inception, operated on pure, brutal capitalistic premises while mouthing sweet democracy rhetoric to veil its true intentions. We, as a people, can simply enjoy our share of ill-gotten gains and continue a blind obedience to capitalistocratic paradigm. Or, we can begin to shoulder some of that burden of responsibility by rejecting the brutality of a rapacious capitalism that feeds on the flesh and bone and soul of humankind before it is too late. For, anything less will consign humanity to the "dust bin" of devolution.

America is not a democracy. America is a plutocracy. Plutocracy is governance by the wealthy. America’s current form of government is based upon a constitution written a little over 200 years ago by a small group of men. While claiming to have created a government that avoided favoring some particular faction of people, the founders, a small group of privileged white men, aristocrats of their time, created a government that in fact, both by its inclusions and its exclusions, favored themselves, others of their class, their heirs, and similar others through the generations.

The practice appropriate for social transformation is the carrying out of collaborative consensus sessions dealing with divisive problems in communities. The goal is somewhere in the direction of an empowered global society, but it cannot be described. Zen’s goal cannot be described because it is ineffable—it cannot be expressed in words.

The battle to reclaim democracy is going to be a difficult one. Our freedoms were not granted to us by any governments. They were wrested from them by us. And once we surrender them, the battle to retrieve them is called a revolution. It is a battle that must range across continents and countries.

As befits a nation of immigrants, American nationalism is defined not by notions of ethnic superiority, but by a belief in the supremacy of U.S. democratic ideals. This disdain for Old World nationalism creates a dual paradox in the American psyche: First, although the United States is highly nationalistic, it doesn’t see itself as such. Second, despite this nationalistic fervor, U.S. policymakers generally fail to appreciate the power of nationalism abroad.

Each of the Iraqi children killed by the United States was our child. Each of the prisoners tortured in Abu Ghraib was our comrade. Each of their screams was ours. When they were humiliated, we were humiliated. The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq - mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from small towns and poor urban neighborhoods - are victims just as much as the Iraqis of the same horrendous process, which asks them to die for a victory that will never be theirs.

So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution.

The defeated 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela and Haiti's continuing agony show the US and its allies are as ready as ever to use covert dirty tricks and outright aggression to get what they want in Latin America. For the moment, the Bush regime seems content to co-opt countries benighted and foolish enough to fall for trade-in-your-sovereignty deals.

Fascism combats the whole complex system of democratic ideology, and repudiates it, whether in its theoretical premises or in its practical application. Fascism denies that the majority, by the simple fact that it is a majority, can direct human society; it denies that numbers alone can govern by means of a periodical consultation, and it affirms the immutable, beneficial, and fruitful inequality of mankind, which can never be permanently leveled through the mere operation of a mechanical process such as universal suffrage....